


3am

by athersgeo



Category: Bourne (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-23
Updated: 2008-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:03:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1625744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athersgeo/pseuds/athersgeo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>3am is a good time for reflection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	3am

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Nessa for saving me from at least some of my mistakes. Any left are my own fault.
> 
> Written for inveigler

 

 

She's a red-head these days. Her hair's much longer, too. Thinner than she used to be, she works in a shop, selling bread and cakes to the locals in an out-of-the-way quarter of Berlin. It isn't her preferred choice of career, and she knows she'll move on sooner rather than later, but it's a good way to earn some cash and it's one of the last places her former employers would consider looking for her.

This isn't what she planned for herself. Isn't how she saw her life going, but then she'd met Neal Daniels and been recruited into a world of shadows and half-truths. And she'd found a fit. The work was interesting and varied and it let her feel as though she was doing some good in the world. Making the world a better place.

Meeting him had changed that.

She tries not to think about that first meeting, but sometimes the memory sneaks up on her unawares. Something about a customer, a smell, a smile, a look, and it comes back, full force. He'd been a soldier. She knew he'd reached the rank of captain, but had no idea where he'd trained or where he'd served. All she knew was that he'd walked into her office one morning, smiled in greeting and suddenly life had been different.

He'd been there for an interview with Daniels. Afterwards, as he came back through her office, he'd asked her if she lived in New York.

 _"Yes,"_ she'd answered.

He'd smiled again, a sort of sheepish expression this time. _"Wonder if you can help me, then. Looks like I'm gonna be here for a while so I was wondering where I could get a meal."_

_"There's a deli just down the block,"_ she had replied. _"Or a pizza place just a bit further."_ She'd hesitated. _"I can show you, if you like?"_

He'd smiled again. A boyish grin that lit his whole face up and made her wonder how he could be old enough to have made captain. _"That'd be great. Thank you. My name's David, by the way...though I guess you probably know that."_

She hadn't. _"Nicky."_

_"Pleased to meet you, Nicky."_

At 3am, when the insomnia and guilt kept her awake, she could admit that she'd fallen in love right there and then and that had been her first mistake. She might not have known his first name, but she did know why he was there. He'd been short listed to join the programme Daniels was setting up and the training would cut him off from any past attachments. It hadn't stopped her.

It hadn't stopped him, either.

They'd had a week. They'd made it seem like so much longer. The sex had been good but the chance to talk with someone at the other end of what she did, that was mind-blowing. She learned so much. Assets stopped being abstract quantities and became real people. People who bled and died if she got her analysis wrong.

It had ended when he'd walked into the training facility one week later and she'd tried not to think about him or about their time together after that. There didn't seem to be much point. She knew she'd never see him again. Instead, she'd focussed on her work with a renewed zeal. It wasn't going to be her mistake that cost someone like him his life.

It had been a shock, some eighteen months later, when he'd walked into her office again, this time for a meeting with Ward Abbott, the new head of the programme. He didn't smile this time. Didn't do more than briefly acknowledge her presence and then dismiss it as if in that one-second glance he'd judged her threat level and determined she was harmless.

 _"Jason Bourne, here to see Abbott,"_ he'd said.

And even that had been different. Cold. Abrupt. Not the same person she'd met before. It had been her second wake up call. The first inkling that something about the Tredstone and Blackbriar projects was dreadfully wrong.

Sometimes, at 3am when the nightmares wake her from a fitful sleep, she wonders what would have happened if she'd acted on that wake up call and walked away from the shadows and secrets. She never finishes that thought though. She knows, now, that even if she'd tried to walk away, they wouldn't have let her. She'd known too much by that point.

Hell, they might even have sent Bourne after her.

So she'd stuck with her job, increasingly uncomfortable with what she was being asked to do. Increasingly uncomfortable with what she knew others were being asked to do. And maybe she'd have stayed that way, but they put her out into the field. Fluent French and German made her an obvious candidate to work in Europe and she'd been posted to Paris.

She doesn't like remembering Paris. She'd been Bourne's contact. That had been hard. Beyond hard, sometimes, not to react to him as her one-time lover. Harder still to watch him and remember who he'd been before. She wasn't sure that she'd have enjoyed the posting if it had been any other agent, but the fact that it had been Bourne.

Sometimes, at 3am when she has to keep the light on for fear of what might be lurking in the dark, she wonders if her posting to Paris had been Abbott's idea of a joke. Or maybe, it was Abbott's way of testing how good the training really was.

Either way; Paris had been hard. She'd been the one to give Bourne the information on Wombosi that had allowed him to set up the assassination. It's not something she's proud of. If it had gone to plan, she would have been complicit in someone's murder. As it was, she was complicit in Bourne's injuries and amnesia.

For nearly a month, she'd thought he was dead. Then he'd shown up in Zurich and every single thing had gone straight to hell.

That had been her third wake up call, watching as Bourne interrogated Conklin at gun point. He hadn't bothered threatening her that night; once more he'd glanced at her and judged her harmless. He'd just left her as a witness to his demands and to the fact that as much as he wanted to kill Conklin, he hadn't.

Conklin had ended up dead anyway, Tredstone had been wrapped up, she'd been reassigned to the Amsterdam office and she'd thought that would be the end of it. 

Perhaps hoped was a better term. 

And for two years, it was over. She'd got on with her job and tried not to think about Bourne. He wasn't the man she'd fallen for, but he wasn't the cold and abrupt assassin now either. He was also with someone and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't help but feel a small stab of jealousy that Marie could have him where she couldn't.

At 3am, when the sirens of wailing police cars make her rigid with terror, she hates herself for those feelings of envy because she knows that in those two years, Bourne was as happy as he could be. Marie gave him a safe haven. A place where he could be without worrying about what he did or did not remember. It was something that he deserved. Something that he should have been allowed to keep.

Someone else had had other ideas.

Even with her connections, she isn't sure whether it was Ward Abbott or his Russian conspirator who sent the assassin after Bourne. Either of them could have done it. Both of them had the motive to do it. Neither of them lived long enough to truly regret it. Gretkov was arrested and hanged himself before his trial. Abbott, after realising he'd incriminated himself beyond repair, blew his brains out.

And Bourne had gone on a kick for revenge.

He'd attacked her in Berlin, trying to wring information from her - more information than she'd had to give. He'd gone to Moscow with what she had been able to give him and dealt with the assassin. He'd gone to see Netski's daughter, too, presumably to make some sort of peace with her or with himself.

Bourne had moved west then, following the Blackbriar/Tredstone trail. She wasn't sure where else he'd been, but she met him again in Madrid. Two weeks after Berlin, he was holding a gun on her again, but this time he seemed to realise she didn't need to be threatened. That she was willing to help him as much as she could. The gun was just a first impulse. A trained reflex.

The journey south, to Tangiers, had been the hardest thing she's ever done. At 3am, when she wakes up alone and confused, she remembers the conversation they'd had at a tiny rest stop somewhere in Southern Spain.

 _"Why are you helping me?"_ he'd asked.

 _"It was difficult. For me. With you,"_ she'd replied. _"You really don't remember, do you?"_

 _"No."_ The answer was a simple, single word.

She wishes she'd said something more. Something clearer. She'd been helping him because of their shared past and because she'd finally heeded the wake up call. Tredstone and Blackbriar needed to be stopped and Bourne was the only person who could do it.

But she'd left it vague and when she realised he truly didn't remember her there didn't seem to be much point in saying anything further. Why torment someone by telling them you know more about them than they do?

Even knowing that helping Bourne was signing her own death warrant, it had still been a shock when she'd realised Desh was coming for her having taken care of Daniels. She'd panicked and fled and nearly gotten herself killed. Bourne had saved her life.

Even now, she wasn't sure how he'd known where to be. Was that more of his training or was it simply dumb luck? She wasn't sure and she didn't need to know. All that counted, in the end, was that she was still alive and now, from being the one who directed the shadows, she'd become a shadow.

Moving from place to place. Job to job. Life to life. Now it was Berlin. Next month it might be Vienna. Next year, Lyon or Marseilles. She hasn't decided yet. Doesn't need to decide until the situation starts feeling wrong.

 _"If it feels wrong, it probably is wrong,"_ he'd warned her before she'd gotten onto the bus that had taken her to her first destination in Monaco where she'd waited tables in a casino as a brunette.

She wakes now. It's 3am and it feels wrong.

As she lies there, breathing evenly as though she were still asleep, she can hear someone moving around in her apartment. Is it the CIA? Have they found her? Or is it someone else with a Tredstone score to settle?

She hears her bedroom door ease open. She eases her hand beneath her pillow, reaching for the gun that she keeps there at all times. She hears her visitor take one step. Two. Three. Into the room. She can hear his breathing - and she's sure the visitor's male. The footstep's too heavy to be a woman. Her hand tightens around the pistol's grip and she counts silently to three.

On three, she rolls over and surges up, her gun aiming at the intruder.

"Don't move or I'll shoot," she warns, her eyes picking out his form.

"No you won't," the intruder answers and for just a moment, she panics.

It's his voice. Bourne. He's here. Has he finally come to settle up with her?

She takes one hand off the gun, still keeping the weapon trained, and reaches for the bedside lamp.

The puddle of light doesn't illuminate much but it does show her that he's unarmed. It doesn't make him any less dangerous but it does let her relax just a hair. He isn't here to kill her.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

"I'm still trying to make the pieces fit together," he answers. "I'm hoping you can help me." 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Fitting The Pieces](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6615928) by [athersgeo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athersgeo/pseuds/athersgeo)




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